Sometimes it seems like we hear an awful lot about all those charter schools in New York City.
Remember those scenes from "Waiting for Superman"? Recall all the media references to Geoffrey Canada and Eva Moskowitz? The Big Apple must be overflowing with charter schools, right?
Well, not exactly.
New York City's charter schools serve 38,743 students -- more than all the students in the Buffalo Public Schools.
That may seem like a lot, but put that in context. New York City also enrolls 973,210 students in its traditional public schools. That means 4 percent of the kids there are enrolled in charter schools, according to a report issued this week by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.
Compare that to Buffalo, where 18 percent of kids are enrolled in charter schools. That's right -- if you do a fair comparison, more than four times as many students enroll in charter schools in Buffalo, compared to New York City.
Here, 6,986 children attend charter schools, compared to 31,590 in the Buffalo Public Schools, according to the report. (Buffalo ranks 15th nationally, tied with five other cities, including Tucson and Minneapolis.)
Albany, by the way, enrolls 23 percent of its students in charter schools -- the highest percentage of any city in the state.
Nationally, the city with the highest charter enrollment is New Orleans, where 70 percent of students attend charter schools.
No. 2 is Washington, D.C., at 39 percent, followed by Detroit, at 37 percent, and Kansas City, MO, at 35 percent.
- Mary Pasciak
facebook.com/mary.pasciak twitter.com/SchoolZoneBlog mpasciak@buffnews.com
